Monitoring Success
Video Streaming IS Put To The Test
by Craig Kuhl -- Multichannel News, 10/12/2008 8:00:00 PM
The expansion of streaming video across multiple platforms and devices is prompting a growing emphasis on measuring online performance and quality.
Users are increasing their expectations, advertising models are being crafted and performance issues such as availability, speed and reliability are top of mind for content providers.
A Jupiter Research report on electronic commerce showed the demand for quality online products, and what happens when such products underperform. According to the study, 75% of those who shop online no longer buy from a site which freezes or crashes, and 28% said such an experience would likely prompt a negative perception of the company. Forty percent of online shoppers said that quick page loading is critical to their loyalty.
According to an ABI Research survey of U.S. online households, the number of consumers watching streaming video via a browser doubled over, last year to 63%. And research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than half of Internet users have watched video online.
“Online video users are still pretty understanding of the lag between server and video,” said Mike Inouye, industry analyst for the research group MultiMedia Intelligence. But, “as more people get online video to TV services … measuring services and their performance will become more critical to monetize the business, especially for the advertising model.”
David Makofske, senior product manager for online streaming firm Akamai Technologies, agreed. “There's definitely more emphasis from customers to see proof that we're better, and measuring is the key,” he said. “In the past, if it worked and scaled, that was enough. Now, customers are looking more at the metrics and want to see quantifiable proof of those metrics.”
The advertising community is paying close attention to those metrics. “As companies move to ad-supported models for monetization, the pressure for an advertising component increases, and shifting to the online space means the media buy increases,” said Makofske. “So, how effective is the buy? A big component is the quality and performance of the user experience.”
Consumers have more expectations with regard to online content, said Imad Mouline, chief technology officer for Gomez, a leading provider of performance-measurement products. “So, you want to know ahead of time about performance and that it is consistent across the network,” he said.
According to Mouline, effectively measuring such performance means having to “look across several different networks and tally up and rank how the sites are doing by testing from different locations.”
Three key metrics are used in measuring video streams, according to Mouline: availability, or the percentage of time a transaction is successful; performance, with regard to response time and load length; and consistency.
There's also the matter of quality, or how good the advertising looks when delivered online. “Now, most networks take ads for TV and repurpose them for online space,” said Rajeev Kutty, product manager for performance-monitoring firm Keynote. “In the future, the ads will be more TV-like, with more quality. That's when ad quality will become much more scrutinized.”
Kutty said that Keynote's monitoring factors in everything that an end user would expect. “We collect the base metrics like availability, connection time, buffering, rebuffering time and average bit rates, depending on what the customer wants,” he said.
For Web-stream content providers such as Fliqz, an all-Web-based business, credibility and reliability are crucial.
“If there are two minutes of no availability, we get a call from our customer,” said Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne.
“We're using a Gomez 24/7 monitoring system that accesses content and monitors streaming rate, latency and Internet connections,” he added. “We can also use it as a diagnostic tool to help us pinpoint problems and their magnitude.”
“The data we take is all logged and put into rich analytic applications which gives a detailed ability to identify every pattern and usage of clients,” said Kelly Egan, senior vice president of business development and sales for Swarmcast, a provider of online video streaming for media entertainment and sports. “And it gives video distributors and advertisers a holistic picture of how to optimize and monetize.”
As Graham Williams, senior director of CDN product management for Level 3, sees it: “The days of experimenting with putting content online are ending. Now, it's generating profit and translating performance into revenue, including advertising models. They want to keep users engaged, so performance is critical.”
And, according to MultiMedia Intelligence's Inouye, monitoring performance and quality will take on even greater significance in the future.
“There will be more demand for video-to-TV, and performance issues will become much more important,” he said.
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